Andrea Modica is an American photographer and professor of photography at Drexel University.

She was born in Brooklyn, New York, in 1960, and is known for portrait photography and for her use of platinum printing, created using an 8"x10" large format camera.

She earned her BFA in Visual Arts and Art History from State University of New York College (SUNY) at Purchase, Purchase, NY in 1982, and earned her MFA in Photography from Yale University in 1985. Her work has been exhibited nationally and internationally and is in many collections, such as The Museum of Modern Art, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Whitney Museum of American Art, the George Eastman House in Rochester, NY, the National Museum of American Art in Washington, D.C., and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art.

Modica has received numerous grants including a Guggenheim Arts Fellowship in 1994 and a Fulbright-Hays Research Grant in 1990. Her work has been published in Newsweek, Harper's, The New York Times Magazine, and other magazines. She taught photography at the State University of New York – Oneonta for thirteen years, and has also taught at Princeton University, Parsons School of Design, the State University of New York College at Purchase.

«I’m not sure I'm the person to answer the question of how I have evolved and grown as a portrait artist over time, as it pertains to the work. I'm more interested in how photographing people has challenged me personally, and enhanced my life, providing me with gift after gift of great intimacy, both with people I know well and with strangers.»

The annual spectacle of the Mummers Parade is a circus of elaborate costumes and fancy footwork. Every New Years Day for the last 116 years, Philadelphians have pranced the streets to pay homage to community tradition. For photographer Andrea Modica, who has been documenting Mummers for the last nine years, it is this sense of neighborly spirit that first drew her in. In a country where society is becoming increasingly fractured, events like this offer a rare opportunity to rally together.

But in among the innocent merrymakers, some have been criticized for parading in culturally inappropriate costumes; from blackface to mock Native American headdresses to takedowns of the LGBTQ community. This reached a peak in 2016 and spurred the organizers to offer sensitivity training to participants. And while hate crimes in the U.S. have reportedly risen under the new administration, this year’s parade seemed largely free from controversy, compared to other years.

«I work intuitively; I rarely know why I need to photograph something or somebody when I begin a project – often it’s a matter of proximity or availability. For example, I read about the Oneonta Yankees returning to our town in the local paper shortly before a nap, and by the time I woke up, I KNEW that I had to photograph the players. The motivation was partly due to proximity, also attraction, partly repulsion, largely confusion – it all turned into an obsession.»

«Julia Margeret Cameron, Bellocq, Man Ray and Sander will always be among my heroes, as well as many, many of my contemporaries, including Lois Conner and Greg Miller - too many to list, though only yesterday I was very moved by Paul Graham's current show in NY, as well as Alec Soth's new show. Perhaps my greatest pleasure in looking at other people's work these days comes from returning to academia after some years, as a professor in Drexel University’s Photography Program. There is something truly inspiring about watching a young person get excited about seeing the world through a camera for the first time.»

Ultimately, Modica is not really interested in the parade itself; “I’ve never been a fan of the circus,” she says. But she is interested in the Wenches; one of the five divisions within the parade - others include the Comic and the Fancy. This division essentially consists of men in drag, many of whom still have costumes their grandfathers and great-grandfathers wore. “I was instantly more interested - as a visual person and as a curious person - in the part of this phenomenon that was outside of the more formal Fancy Brigade,” she says. “So this felt to me like the real heart of this genre. The other part of it is that they, simply put, they're men in dresses. I mean, that's just interesting, is it not?”

Prior to creating her series Best Friends, artist Andrea Modica had been photographing young people in a Connecticut high school. Most of her portraits featured individual teens, but very quickly she noticed that each subject’s best friend would often be present in the background during these photoshoots. Soon she started photographing friends together, capturing the intensity of these important relationships formed during the challenging years of adolescence. From Connecticut, Modica went on to work in other high schools—first in Philadelphia, and later in Modena, Italy—to create her series of platinum palladium prints from 8×10 negatives. Modica’s meticulous craftsmanship is evident in each work, as well as her patience and attention to detail. She waits for just the right moment to click the shutter, revealing the piercingly defiant, occasionally wistful, or frankly ambivalent faces staring back at us.

Modica's most known work is Treadwell. From 1986 to 2001, she staged and photographed a young girl named Barbara and her family in upstate New York with an 8x10 view camera, following the family from farmhouse to farmhouse in the town of Treadwell. Chronicle Books published the work in book form in 1996. She continued to photograph Barbara until her death in 2001 from childhood diabetes. The work from the later period of Barbara's life was published by Nazraeli Press in 2002.

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